POSTS

Media Highlights for 2024

Books

The cover of "On Freedom" by Timothy Snyder Image: Crown Publishing Group Inc
  • Highlight: On Freedom by Timothy Snyder My thoughts here
  • Honorable mentions:
    • How to Steal a Presidential Election by Lawrence Lessig and Matthew Seligman My thoughts here
    • Invisible Rulers by Renée DiResta

Albums

The cover of "All Born Screaming": a photo of Annie Clark hunched over and on fire Image: St. Vincent

NPR’s Tiny Desk

Willo performs in NPR's offices Image: National Public Radio

Videos

Conan O''Brien slathering himself with hot sauce Image: First We Feast

Articles

Photo of plants growing from a vaguely futuristic pillar Image: Noah Campeau for Noema Magazine

  • Highlight: We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon [noemamag.com]

    Ecologists have reoriented their field as a “crisis discipline,” a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same. Rewilding the internet connects and grows what people are doing across regulation, standards-setting and new ways of organizing and building infrastructure, to tell a shared story of where we want to go. It’s a shared vision with many strategies. The instruments we need to shift away from extractive technological monocultures are at hand or ready to be built.

    We don’t know what the future holds. Our job is to keep open as much opportunity as we can, trusting that those who come later will use it. Instead of setting purity tests for which kind of internet is most like the original, we can test changes against the values of the original design. Do new standards protect the network’s “generality,” i.e. its ability to support multiple uses, or is functionality limited to optimize efficiency for the biggest tech firms?

    As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day.

  • Honorable mentions:

    • Why We Need Public Libraries Now More than Ever by Tom McGrath [bostonmagazine.com]

      The BPL’s motto, emblazoned on many of its buildings, is “Free to All.” In a private-equity world, “free” isn’t something we do much of, let alone “for all.”

    • AI and Trust by Bruce Schneier [schneier.com]

      We can never make AI into our friends. But we can make them into trustworthy services—agents and not double agents. But only if government mandates it. We can put limits on surveillance capitalism. But only if government mandates it.

      Because the point of government is to create social trust. I started this talk by explaining the importance of trust in society, and how interpersonal trust doesn’t scale to larger groups. That other, impersonal kind of trust—social trust, reliability and predictability—is what governments create.

      To the extent a government improves the overall trust in society, it succeeds. And to the extent a government doesn’t, it fails.

      But they have to. We need government to constrain the behavior of corporations and the AIs they build, deploy, and control. Government needs to enforce both predictability and reliability.

      That’s how we can create the social trust that society needs to thrive.

    • The Self-Doubting Superpower by Fareed Zakaria [foreignaffairs.com]

      In a 1999 article in these pages, “The Lonely Superpower,” the political scientist Samuel Huntington tried to look beyond unipolarity and described the emerging world order. The term he came up with was “uni-multipolar,” an extremely awkward turn of phrase yet one that captured something real. In 2008, when I was trying to describe the emerging reality, I called it a “post-American world” because it struck me that the most salient characteristic was that everyone was trying to navigate the world as U.S. unipolarity began to wane. It still seems to be the best way to describe the international system.

    • falling for prince’s fridge by Jenn Schiffer [livelaugh.blog]

      Jenn knows a thing or two about satire.

      the only thing funnier than media publications falling for an april fools joke is when they fall for it…five fucking years later.

    • The Bloodbath Candidate by Timothy Snyder [snyder.substack.com]

      The fascist-style martyrdom cult justifies violence, in two ways. It makes a hero of criminals, thereby making criminality exemplary. And it establishes prior innocence – we suffered first, and therefore anything we do to make others suffer will always be justified. The Nazis sang their Horst Wessel Song as they conquered countries and killed millions.

    • War Unbound by Oona A. Hathaway [foreignaffairs.com]

      Israel has turned a principle that was meant to shield civilians into a tool to justify violence. Its approach to assessing proportionality–not strike by strike but in light of the entire war aim–is not how militaries are supposed to carry out their assessments. Rather, according to international law as codified in Additional Protocol I, the principle of proportionality prohibits a given attack where the expected harm to civilian people and places is “excessive” compared with the “direct military advantage” that the attack is supposed to achieve. By weighing any single instance of harm to civilians against a perceived existential threat, Israel can justify virtually any strike as meeting the requirements of proportionality; the purported benefits always outweigh any costs. Unsurprisingly, this approach has led to a war with few restraints.

    • Destroy AI by Ali Alkhatib [ali-alkhatib.com]

      If you see a system dismantling a human being’s life, do you think that the system must be fixed, or that the system must be destroyed?

    • Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative by Andreas Kling [ladybird.org]

    • Conan O’Brien Doesn’t Matter by Jason Zinoman [nytimes.com]

      Asked if this means he wants to be cremated, O’Brien responded: “I want to be left in a ditch and found by a jogger.” Taking up space in a cemetery seems selfish to him. “I say this in a positive way,” he added, leaning forward and shifting to a less jokey tone. “We don’t matter.”

    • China’s Real Economic Crisis by Zongyuan Zoe Liu [foreignaffairs.com]

      Paradoxically, even as Beijing’s industrial policy goals change, many of the features that drive overcapacity persist. Whenever the Chinese government prioritizes a new sector, duplicative investments by local governments inevitably fuel intense domestic competition. Firms and factories race to produce the same products and barely make any profit–a phenomenon known in China as nei juan, or involution. Rather than try to differentiate their products, firms will attempt to simply outproduce their rivals by expanding production as fast as possible and engaging in fierce price wars; there is little incentive to gain a competitive edge by improving corporate management or investing in R&D. At the same time, finite domestic demand forces firms to export excess inventory overseas, where it is subject to geopolitics and the fluctuations of global markets. Economic downturns in export destinations and rising trade tensions can stymie export growth and worsen overcapacity at home.

    • St. Vincent Has Re-Recorded ‘All Born Screaming’ in Spanish by Kory Grow [rollingstone.com]

    • Digital ID Isn’t for Everybody, and That’s Okay by Alexis Hancock [eff.org]

      This sounds like a real hazard for free software…

    • Wars Are Not Accidents by Erik Lin-Greenberg [foreignaffairs.com]

      Escalation is real (and thresholds are often deliberately ambiguous), but maybe peace isn’t quite as fragile as the media tends to suggest.

    • 10 ways to be prepared and grounded it Trump wins by Daniel Hunter [wagingnonviolence.org]

      I’m reminded of another way of finding your role that comes from my friend Ingrid’s grandfather, who lived in Norway under the Nazi regime. He learned that the resistance was hiding people in the basement of a church near a cemetery. As a florist he already traveled to and from the cemetery — so he found a role smuggling messages in funeral wreaths, delivering them all over the city.

      He didn’t go out designing his perfect role. In fact, I’m not sure he would have looked at the list of possible “roles” and found his political path. Instead, he found his space by circumstance.

    • Oligarchs’ Island by Timothy Snyder [snyder.substack.com]

      A smart mixture of levity and sobriety.

      A proviso first. What is about to happen in our world is horrible. It is no exaggeration to say that the plans of oligarchs put millions of lives at risk right away. Yet no matter how dark the evil, there is always a corner for ridicule’s little lantern.

      It is evil that Putin believes that he should destroy Ukraine because it never existed, but it is also idiotic. It is evil that Musk wants to escape Earth and leave the rest of us behind, but it is also silly. It is evil that Trump and Musk repeat genocidal Russian propaganda, but it also humiliating.

    • The New Battle for the Middle East by Karim Sadjadpour

      A single source can’t convince me to be optimistic about Saudi Arabia, but I’m at least now open to the idea that my thinking is outdated. The author explicitly argues that recent developments in US-China and US-Russia relations change things. They also imply that in for the past few years, 39-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or “MBS”) has been pushing the country toward human rights as quickly as is politically feasible. Written out, “as quickly as politically feasible” feels like an awfully low bar, but (as the author does point out) prior leaders have been assassinated for that kind of change.

      (This was also my introduction to Neom, which is an absolutely wild project.)

    • The Populist Phantom by Larry M. Bartels [foreignaffairs.com]

      “It’s the leaders, stupid.” Basically, the populace is way too impressionable (and not nearly principled enough) to be ascribable to perceived shifts. It’s an elitist argument (and the author can’t completely expunge that from his rhetoric), but I’m still thinking it’s better than the currently-favored narrative.

      Maybe the most constructive takeaway is to be more suspicious of elected officials, overall–to be more ready to question them when they are (ostensibly or avowedly) representing their constituency. Remembering that a leaders’ responsibility is to lead the crowd, not to follow it. And that, once again, good faith is foundational.

      The frictions stemming from immigration are real. But they reflect the increasing intensity of feeling among a minority, not the massive, irresistible tide of popular conviction that many observers imagine. Moreover, their political implications are often overblown; much of the opposition to immigration is more symbolic than concrete. For example, a June 2024 Gallup poll found 47 percent of Americans saying they favored “deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country.” But anyone tempted to take that dire finding at face value would do well to note that 70 percent of the same survey respondents said they favored “allowing immigrants living in the United States illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.” As with many issues, there may be less to the public’s immigration policy preferences than meets the eye. Exaggerating the breadth and solidity of anti-immigrant sentiment merely encourages mainstream political leaders to cave to pressure from extremists, abdicating their responsibility to craft policies and rhetoric that address the issue soberly and sensibly.

    • Our Own Worst Enemies by Robert A. Pape [foreignaffairs.com]

      Cutting the Fuse has been on my list for over a decade; it’s good to know the author continues to do empirical research in service of public policy.

      Anyway, the thesis is: things are going to get rougher, still, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

      In fact, popular support for violence is one of the best predictors of bloodshed. Before The Troubles, in the second half of the twentieth century, Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland both grew much more supportive of using force to change the region’s political arrangement. In Spain, support for violence went up before the Basque nationalist Euskadi Ta Askatasuna movement began an assassination campaign against the country’s authoritarian government during the same era. And West Germans were increasingly supportive of attacks before the Baader-Meinhof Gang (also known as the Red Army Faction) conducted a series of bombings and assassinations in the 1970s.

      […]

      Ultimately, Americans should stay hopeful. Most of them, after all, continue to abhor political violence–even if a significant minority now support it. According to the June survey, 70 percent of Republicans oppose political violence and want leaders to condemn its use. So do over 80 percent of Democrats. Elected officials at all levels of government should listen to their constituents and curtail incendiary rhetoric. Trump, of course, shows few signs of doing so. But the broad condemnation of political violence by both Democrats and Republicans in the aftermath of the attempts on his life has set an important precedent that all other leaders can and should emulate.